With ""My Life among the Deathworks; Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority"", the renowned cultural theorist and Freud
scholar Philip Rieff inaugurates a trilogy that signals the
summation of his scholarly lifework. With this series, ""Sacred
Order/Social Order"", to be published in consecutive volumes, Rieff
both continues and supersedes the lines of thought that
characterize the earlier, influential works upon which his
reputation was forged. Readers familiar with Rieff's distinctive
oeuvre will recognize central themes and find final recitations on
the cultural impact of Freud and his creation ""psychological man""
or ""the therapeutic,"" which Rieff here renames the ""new man"".
Whether conversant with Rieff's work or new to its unique
interpretive power, readers of ""Sacred Order/Social Order"" will
discover a series of provocative insights, illuminated by Rieff's
wide-ranging expositions, theoretical advances, and stylistic
innovations. In this first volume, Rieff articulates a
comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual
illustrations and unique juxtapositions, he displays remarkable
erudition in drawing from such disciplines as sociology, history,
literature, poetry, music, plastic arts, and film; he contrasts the
changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled
for dominance throughout Western history. Our modern culture - to
Rieff's mind only the ""third"" type in Western history - is the
object of his deepest scrutiny, described here as morally ruinous,
death-affirming rather than life-affirming, and representing an
unprecedented attempt to create a culture completely devoid of any
concept of the sacred. For Rieff, culture represents the ""form of
fighting before the firing begins"" in a literal life-and-death
struggle for a particular type of world-creation. Having concluded
in this final phase of his career that there is no neutral ground
in this struggle, Rieff takes aim at many of the most significant
""deathworks"" in modern literature, art, and history - from
Joyce's ""Finnegans Wake"" and ""Duchamp's Etant donnes"" to
Hitler's death camps - in an attempt to undo them by using them
against themselves. In so doing, he seeks to show the reader what
really animates, and is ultimately at stake, in the contemporary
""culture wars"" raging over such issues as euthanasia, education,
medical research, sexuality, race, class, and gender.
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